


A Different Truth Between Us

by Koren M (CyberMathWitch)



Series: A Different Truth Between Us [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - X-Files Fusion, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-11 23:45:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4457114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyberMathWitch/pseuds/Koren%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He walks into the basement office expecting his new assignment to be a glorified babysitting job.  He certainly isn’t expecting to get drawn into a shadow war much more sinister and desperate than the one he just left behind.<br/>The more things change…<br/>The more they remain the same.<br/><i>(Or, the X-Files AU you never knew you needed.)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A Different Truth Between Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [topaz119 (topaz)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/gifts).



> This is entirely AoU (and everything else) divergent, no MCU canon need apply. ;)
> 
> For the Prompt from Topaz119: “I love fusions, where canon is translated into a different historical era or genre” - well, it’s certainly a fusion, and definitely a different genre. _(Are the 90’s considered a different historical era? Because if not, they really should be.)_
> 
> Many, many thanks to [kadollan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kadollan) for the beta-reading (and pouring the tea about the articles of serial killers).
> 
> I’m not sure it’s “fun and light” (I’m sorry!), but I also wouldn’t by any means call it overly angsty or dark fic, and I hope you like it! :D

"Agent Barton, do you know why you're here?"

Clint resists the urge to fidget in his chair under the Director’s assessing gaze. He can handle field officers just fine, but suits have always made him twitchy. The three in this room are no exception.

He really doesn’t have any idea, so he shakes his head. "No, sir."

“You’re being reassigned from Quantico as a field agent,” the Director announces, and Clint’s eyes widen in surprise. His leg has healed fine, but the hearing damage is permanent, and that pretty much guarantees he’ll never go back out on a mission. He’d always been given the impression that being shunted off to the F.B.I to teach marksmanship was a way to keep him out of trouble and keep his skills from going to waste. Being a field agent hadn’t been part of the deal.

"Are you familiar with an Agent by the name of Natasha Romanov?"

"Well, yeah." he replies, puzzled, and the guy looks surprised.

"How so?"

"By reputation. Everybody talks about her at the Academy. The FBI's Golden Girl, shit-hot profiler, who washed out with the rest of Petrovich's experimental team. The only one still around," he adds.

It's one of those things, Clint knows, that no one “officially” talks about even though everyone talks about it - how Ivan Petrovich had defected in the 80s, some kind of brilliant psychologist, and started working for the FBI trying to build up their criminal profiling division. Most profilers put things together through a lot of hard work, a lot of memorizing facts and statistics and psychological theory and then spinning the puzzle pieces until they match a likely picture of a criminal, all very mundane though mentally and emotionally taxing, but Petrovich had been working with something much deeper. He'd tried to train his proteges, most of them women, to actually walk around inside the head of a killer, to imagine becoming them to better anticipate their movements and behaviours.

Rumor had it sometimes it had been more than just an intellectual exercise.

Rumor also maintained that Agent Romanov had been one of the few to escape with her mind still intact. Some people called her spooky, but an enterprising soul had dubbed her "the Black Widow" and it had stuck. 

Clint also knows that a lot of the FBI brass had shit themselves when she'd quit the VCU and decided to go chasing imaginary monsters instead.

"And are you familiar with her... more recent lines of investigation?"

"She's into the weird stuff, right? Crazy cults, aliens, people who think they're vampires or that they've seen ghosts or whatever?"

The director looks pained, but he nods. "Something to that effect, yes. She's been working on an unassigned project, the X-Files. We want you to assist her investigating those cases, and write field reports on your activities, along with your observations regarding the validity of the work."

"Sorry, lemme get this straight. You want me to go in there and, what, debunk the X-Files? Or am I supposed to be a glorified babysitter?”

The two men closest to him remain stern, but the third man in the corner starts to smile.

"Why me?" Clint asks, knowing his previous question was taken as rhetorical. 

"You've got a certain reputation for being... no nonsense," the second man tries, and now, the third's smile turns into a deep, full laugh and he steps forward.

"Agent Barton," he begins, "to put it simply? The Bureau is fairly well convinced that they have your loyalty, considering your background. Some of these cases... well. Let's just say they can sometimes come uncomfortably close to other, more delicate matters. Matters we would prefer someone like Agent Romanov was steered away from when we need her to be. They trust that you'll be willing to do that for them."

Something in his tone of voice and a barely-there emphasis on “they” tells Clint that maybe he isn't so sure, and moreover, that maybe he would be okay with them being wrong.

*****

Another fifteen minutes of hemming and hawing and having them outline what they want him to do down to the length and type spacing of the reports they _all_ know he's not actually going to file, and he finds himself in the basement.

That's somehow fitting.

He knocks on the door, not sure what to expect, because he's _heard_ of her, but never actually seen her.

"Nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted," comes a vaguely sarcastic reply, and the corner of his mouth twitches up in a grin. If she's got a sense of humor, maybe this assignment won't suck quite so bad.

He takes it as invitation to proceed, and opens the door, getting his first look at the office that's apparently going to be his new home, at least until he pisses the brass off again. Different brass, same song and dance, he thinks.

She's sitting with her back not quite to the door, angled in her chair at a table with a light box, studying something with what looks like a photographer's lens in her hand.

"Agent Romanov? I'm Agent Barton. I've, uh, been assigned to work with you?"

"I was under the impression," she begins, looking up from her slides, "that you were sent to spy on me."

He shuffles slightly where he stands, rocks back and forth on his feet because the dress shoes don't fit him quite right, but his shoulders and head stay up and back, not down. He's not about to deny it, but, "If you've got any doubts about my qualifications-" he starts, but with an arched brow and a wave of her hand she stops him.

"Fast-tracked into the military right after high school, 99th percentile on the ASVAB, broke everyone's hearts when you skipped the officer track and went into infantry. Highest accuracy tests for sniping, possibly in recorded military history, along with a Purple Heart and some interestingly timed gaps in your records that tell me you didn't do what the 'official' accounts may've said you did. Recently, you've been teaching marksmanship at the Academy, after graduating just a year ago yourself." The way she's rattled off his achievements from his official file, pointing out the exceptions, means that she anticipated this, him specifically, and did her homework. Impressive. 

"Got me all figured out, then?"

"Black ops, probably. CIA sideline, maybe; particularly with getting into the Bureau without a college degree which is virtually unheard of. Either they want to punish you, or they want to keep an eye on you - _or_ , and I find this much more likely, they've got you by the balls and know you're going to do whatever they want."

He just nods, doesn't give her the satisfaction of surprise, and shifts his shoulders again. The ill-cut suit doesn't quite line up right on his frame. She, on the other hand, has no such problems; she stands up, and he gets a full look at very nicely tailored dress pants and a blouse, both of which look more expensive than an agent ought to be able to afford, and what looks like stylish but still very functional boots - he wishes he could say the same about his footwear. Damn dress shoes'll be the death of him the first time he has to go running after or away from something in the field.

"Look, they said you deal with weird shit, and can't seem to keep a partner. Frankly, I'm not in a position to complain about having a job right now, and weird shit doesn't really bother me. So it sounds like we're stuck with one another, at least for the time being."

Something shifts in her eyes, she gives him a considering look. "Alright. Give me your frank opinion about this," she walks over to a projector, already set up against a white board, and flips over a slide of a dead body, a woman. "Oregon female, age twenty-one, no apparent cause of death. The autopsy didn't reveal anything."

Another slide shifts by, this one a close up of the girl's lower back, and two small raised marks. "All they found were these two distinct marks on her lower back. Any ideas what could've caused them?"

He looks it over and shakes his head. "Needle punctures, maybe? Or insect bites? Maybe marks from a homemade stun gun?"

"Got any chemistry? This," a slide popped up of a molecular formula, "is what was found in the surrounding tissue."

"I know the basics of material handling, but no, that's way outta my league.”

"It's organic. That's all the lab techs can tell me. But here it is again in Sturgis, South Dakota, and again, in Shamrock, Texas."

More slides, zip zip zip, more bodies, all with the same strange markings.

"You got a theory?"

"I have plenty of theories," she says with a smile that's not entirely nice. "But what I want to know, is why it's Bureau policy to label these cases "unexplained phenomenon" and ignore them. Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?"

The rapid shift almost throws him, but he gets that she’s baiting him. "Aliens? You're kidding, right? I mean, look. I grew up in the circus, okay? I know you know that from my file. Humanity... we're weird. And we're messed up, and we sure as hell can mess each other up, but you don't have to go looking up at the night sky to see that. There's plenty of explanations right down here. Those women obviously died of something, or someone. If it was natural causes, then somebody missed something in the autopsy. If it was murder, maybe there was a sloppy investigation. But I think it's kind of ridiculous to look at these bodies and jump to the conclusion that it was _aliens_. Answers are right here on earth. You just have to know where to look."

"And that," she says bluntly, "is why they put the 'I' in 'F.B.I.'. See you tomorrow morning, Agent Barton, bright and early. We leave for Oregon at 8 a.m.."

She brushes past him, sitting back down at her desk in obvious dismissal.

But he's smiling as he walks out the door.

*****

The plane ride is boring as hell, but way more comfortable than army transpos ever were. When they hit turbulence right before their descent, he thinks that he and Romanov might be the only two people who don't scream.

The rental car shorts out on the road into town, and she actually stops and gets out to mark the ground with spray paint, but won't tell him why. She looks both excited and worried, eyes darting up and around and over, and he's not sure if it's because of the woods, or the weather, or if she _actually_ believes there are aliens about to drop down to take them away.

*****

The strange corpse in the casket doesn't actually bother him, he's seen fake "mummies" before. It's a common sideline attraction, he's even helped make one himself back when he was maybe ten or eleven. (He will only admit to himself that this one is a damn sight better than any he's actually _seen_ before, however.) He does want to find out what happened to the kid who should've been buried there, though, because he takes offense at the idea of people who might've cared about him having to go through that added shock and horror.

She rattles on about the x-rays. He goes for a run.

*****

They end up in the forest in the middle of the night, in the rain, get chased out by the cop (who Clint has decided is definitely in on this up to his eyeballs), and slog back to their car grouchy, cold, and frustrated. He's been worse, he'll take cold and wet over hot and sandy any day of the week, but he's half-focused on the promise of a hot shower back at the motel room when the radio and clock start to go haywire and screech at them and a flash of light nearly runs them off the road.

Clint blinks and shakes his head to try to clear it, pounding his fist against the door to try to shake off the buzzing that feels like it's in his head and all over his body for a second there. Romanov is already shoving open the driver's side door, jumping out of the car, and running back behind it and he follows her, because what the hell is she thinking.

The car turns back on, just as suddenly as it had stopped, and when he looks down between their feet he sees the orange markings she'd made two days before.

Well, hell.

*****

"We lost nine minutes!" she exclaims as she shoves into her room and he follows. She throws her bag down into a chair, and starts unzipping her windbreaker while she rambles on about abductees and missing time and what the holy hell, he thinks, because she didn't stop with the windbreaker, she's shoving off the rest of her clothes as she heads to the bathroom, thankfully shutting the door behind her before stripping off her underwear, still ranting about the phenomenon, and-

wait.

"Romanov!" he yells, suddenly worried, suddenly scared, he bangs his fist against the door because he saw - he thought he saw-

"What?" she looks irritated at being interrupted, when she opens the door, but he ignores it and grabs her bare shoulder, turns her to the thin light from the lamp before she could actually clock him. Because she suddenly sees in the mirror the same thing he's seen and he's close enough to realize that she's now holding her breath.

There are two neat marks on the small of her back, just over her left hip, just like the photos. He crouches down, ignoring how precarious this situation might seem from outside it, to try to get a closer look. 

"Are those-" he starts to ask, but she runs her fingers over them, followed by her fingernail, then grimaces.

"No," she says flatly. "They're mosquito bites. They were all over the place out there, you'll probably have your own share if you're not itching already." She untangles herself from between him and the door frame. "Go shower, and bring back coffee. We've got a lot of work to do."

******

The power goes out before he makes it back with coffee from the diner across the street, and when he walks in she’s trying to look over files with a flashlight. When it becomes obvious that the power isn’t going to come back on, she seems to give up on getting any more work done and packs everything away.

But they’re both still too wired from the events earlier in the evening, and they settle in, he’s sprawled on her bed and she’s sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. He can’t remember how the topic wanders, but finds himself asking her why?

“Why the X-Files?”

"I grew up in Martha's Vineyard. It was this perfect, idyllic childhood, except that my parents were absent a lot of the time. My father worked for the government, and mom... she spent a lot of time in her own head. But I did all the normal kid things, like ballet and piano and soccer, I got good grades, and so on." Her head tips back so that she's looking at the ceiling instead of at him. "I graduated with honors and went to Oxford to study psychology, and while I was there I met Ivan Petrovich and he recruited me into the FBI and the violent crimes unit. It seems I had a natural aptitude for applying behavioural models to criminal cases.”

Clint nods but doesn't say anything, because if he interrupts her she might stop and he wants to hear the rest of her story.

"When I worked with Petrovich, one of the techniques we experimented with was hypnosis. He theorized that relaxing the mind and body would make us more receptive to creating mental pictures of the criminals we profiled. After a few sessions, I started having nightmares." She laughs abruptly, but it isn’t a happy sound. "We all had nightmares thanks to what we were doing, but mine were different. And It felt like things were missing out of my head. When I was awake, I realized that I couldn't remember specific things, like what I'd done the night before I started college, or whether or not I'd ever skipped a class in my senior year. Nothing big, nothing major, all the 'milestones' that ought to be there were, but something didn't feel right. I felt like something had happened to me, that I hadn't previously been aware of. And that’s when I came across the X-Files."

“By accident?”

“At first, it looked like a garbage dump for UFO sightings, alien abduction reports, the kind of thing that most people laugh at as being ridiculous. But I was fascinated. I read all the cases I could get my hands on, hundreds of them. I read everything I could about paranormal phenomenon, about the occult, and…”

“What?”

“There’s classified government information I’ve been trying to access, but someone has been blocking my attempts to get at it.”

“Who?”

“Someone at a higher level. The only reason they’ve let me continue my work is because I’ve made connections in congress.”

“They’re afraid, what, that you’ll leak this stuff?”

Her expression darkens. “You’re a part of their agenda, you know that.”

He meets and holds her gaze. “I’m not part of _any_ agenda.” And it burns in his chest that he kind of is, but he certainly doesn’t want to be, he’s tired of it, he’s never wanted the political games, they’ve always been the worst part of his job. “I’m here just like you, to solve this. You need to trust me.”

She looks at him head on, and he sees a kind of wild determination in her eyes. “I’m telling you this because you need to know, because of what you’ve seen and what you will see. I’ve gone to other hypnotherapists since leaving the VCU, and every time I remember more and more. Things like being handcuffed to my bed at night, in cold rooms I can’t remember, and of doing awful things to people I’ve never met. I find more instances of missing time, more pieces of the puzzle that just don’t line up. And I’m not alone. There’s something going on, that the public isn’t aware of, and the government knows about it, and I need to know what it is. Nothing else matters to me, and this is as close as I’ve ever gotten to it.”

The phone rings, shocking them both out of the moment, and he shakes it off and reaches for the receiver. The voice on the other end says that the O'Dell girl is dead. 

They reach the crime scene and thanks to the rain it’s remarkably not as bloody as it should’ve been, but it’s also apparent how she died. The driver insists she ran out into the road even though they all know she can’t walk, and after noting the time on her wrist he feels his stomach turn over. A couple of minutes after nine, just like when their car went crazy Clint stands and starts back towards their car and then the Medical Examiner's daughter nearly tackles them across the crime scene tape. She's obviously terrified, her father and the detective obviously know what's going on when they come to get her, and if this is how their cases are going to go, Clint's pretty sure he's gonna get tired of this really fast.

And then they realize their motel is burning down with all their notes and files in it, and suddenly everything gets a whole lot bigger.

******

Clint can understand wanting to protect your kid - he's never had one, but he can imagine, and he's seen the lengths good people are often willing to go for them. By that logic, when all is said and done, he figures that Detective Miles and Dr. Nemman are (at least in that regard) probably good people, and the kid, Billy, certainly seems like he's almost an innocent bystander in the whole fiasco. It still doesn't explain why those kids were being targeted, or what exactly the light was in the woods right before they stopped Theresa from dying, but by the time they're on their flight back to DC he really doesn't care.

He much prefers it when there are bad guys to deal with, instead of people just ending up in weird and shitty circumstances.

Romanov is as silent on the way back as she was on the flight out, her expression tense and pensive as she rewrites her notes and tries to reconstruct what she can remember from what burned.

For his part, he writes about a page of bullshit that he peppers with psychological mumbo-jumbo he remembers the nurse spouting about Billy's condition, and files it away for the men in the suits to do with what they will.

******

**Author's Note:**

> So this? Was not my original plan for this exchange. And by “not my original plan” I mean I had 85-90% of the fic I was originally writing done when I sat down Monday night, but instead of finishing that, I suddenly had Natasha in my head uttering the line “I was under the impression you were sent to spy on me”.
> 
> And _whoosh_ down the rabbit hole I went. A few hours later, I had this. Some iconic conversations and actions/reactions remained the same, while others shifted and changed dramatically. I (hope) I did what was most true to the characters and the original story. I was really excited to see how it all played out, and the possibilities for how other moments or events might happen has me almost giddy. (That said, I haven't really done something _quite_ like this before, so that could also be the nerves talking...)
> 
> I've always drawn a very strong parallel in my head to the relationship between Clint and Natasha, and the one between Mulder and Scully, but this was the first time I really considered other possible parallels between their stories. Many of the themes are the same: trust, survival, self-definition and working around and within the mechanics of bigger schemes and pictures than meets the eye, and ultimately sacrifice of one's self and personal goals and missions for the greater good (potentially). 
> 
> I glossed over big sections of action from the original show and left it as understood, both because I wanted to focus on the characters and how their paths differ from Mulder and Scully, but also because I didn't want to spend the entire time retreading existing ground; too much detail tends to cause things to collapse under their own weight. So if you're not familiar with the X-Files, I highly recommend it, but apologize for any potential confusion in the meantime!


End file.
